Let Nobody Turn Us Around An African American Anthology

Throughout their entire history as a people, African Americans have created themselves. They did so in the context of the transatlantic slave trade and two-and-a-half centuries of chattel slavery—a structure of overwhelming inequality and brutality characterized by the sale of human beings and routine rapes and executions. They constructed their cultural identity and notions of humanity in a country that denied them citizenship and basic human dignity for hundreds of years. Beginning as enslaved Africans from various locations and ethnic and language groups across the continent of Africa, within several generations they found their voice, meaning, and consciousness as a special people.

Those captured from Africa were not people without history and culture. They were mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, and descendants of ancestors; they were religious specialists and supplicants, chiefs and commoners, cooks, musicians, metalworkers, scribes, farmers, and grioles; they belonged to states, clans, lineages, age grades, men’s and women’s associations, artisan guilds, and secret societies. Their memories of how life should be lived, of womanhood and manhood, of beauty and aesthetics, of worship and spirituality, were not annihilated by the Middle Passage. But what they could do with these memories was very much constrained by the conditions in which they found themselves—the racial and class structure of enslavement. To paraphrase a well-known observation, African Americans created themselves, but not just as they pleased, not under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. It was in the context of their African history and the prevailing social and economic relationships that African Americans created culture, religion, family, art forms, political institutions, and social and political theory.

Social and political theory—bodies of knowledge by which African Americans attempted to analyze and address the social, cultural, and political issues they confronted—emerged from everyday practices to reform and resist the structures of oppression, and to renew their community through imagining and enacting its continuity. Attempts to reform, utilizing group and individual resources to mitigate the worst aspects of the society and to enhance black interests within the state apparatus, ranged from petitions to the colonial legislatures and federal government for redress, lobbying for the abolition of slavery, and participation in various political parties to influence white liberal opinion on issues of race. Resistance was found in the various degrees of opposition to institutional racism: from day-to-day sabotage (disruption, noncompliance, refusals to work, running away) to overt rebellion (the murder of slaveholders, flight to the North, the underground railroad, joining forces with American Indian tribes to combat the U.S. army, the creation of maroon communities, and the slave uprisings of Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, and Cinque). Throughout their history African Americans nurtured and renewed their emerging community—creating and maintaining cultural forms and building viable institutions to provide goods, services, and cultural and educational sustenance.

Yet social and political theory is not merely reactive. Though it was a collective effort to address existing social institutions and structures of power, it was also a search for meaning and voice. Social thought sought to understand who we are, envision new directions, and imagine a new society. The purpose was not only to advocate, but to realize our meaning and being.

The themes of reform, resistance, and renewal formed the cultural and social matrix of black consciousness, community, and public discourse. They were the foundations for the construction of a black American society that was self-conscious and motivated to define and achieve its specific interests. It was within this political culture and this web of increasingly elaborate social institutions—black religious denominations, Masonic lodges, free African societies, schools, newspapers—that competing strategic visions of how best to achieve group empowerment and self-organization began to crystallize.

The decisive historical period in the construction of black ideologies was between 1830 and 1865. The free black community in the North numbered more than one hundred thousand. The immediate question confronting African Americans was how to dismantle slavery—the oppression of four million people of African descent. But the larger issue was whether and how black people could find freedom, in the United States or elsewhere, while preserving what was valuable and central to their collective identity as a people. Are we Africans, or are we both Africans and Americans? Is our collective future inextricably linked to the U.S. state and American society? It was in the context of the national debate about slavery that two overlapping political ideologies emerged among black Americans, representing two different aspects of the same racial dilemma: the possibility of black Americans achieving equality within America’s racialized social body.

What became known in the twentieth century as “integrationism” actually originated among the free black communities in the North prior to the Civil War. A core of free black leaders—journalists, teachers, ministers, small entrepreneurs, abolitionists—concluded that the fight to abolish slavery could be won, but that it would represent only one part of a greater struggle: to expand the limited boundaries of American democracy to include people of African descent. The task ahead was to bring Negroes into every profession and to ensure their full participation in voting, serving on juries, and running for elective office. Black people would have the unalienable right to own property, to have unfettered access to public accommodation and schools, and the freedom to hire themselves out for a fair wage. The only limitations on any individual’s success would be determined by intellect and ambition, not by race.

The goal of integrationists was a society where color was insignificant and where individual achievement and hard work largely determined the life chances of most black people. Inherent in this ideological perspective was an inner paradox. Integrationist reformers often had no choice but to build black organizations behind the walls of segregation, to mobilize their supporters, and to appeal to sympathetic whites. At times, race consciousness among African Americans was used to challenge Jim Crow. A. Philip Randolph’s Negro March on Washington, D.C., in 1941 and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s construction of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957 are two of many examples. Building on a racial base could be useful, but only for the long-term goal of eradicating all racial classifications and caste privileges that penalized Negroes simply because of the color of their skin. In other words, the struggle for integration often had to be waged from within the boundaries of racial identity. This strategy also implied that what was “wrong” with the United States could be made right, if restrictions on the basis of race could be eliminated and if blacks and other disadvantaged groups could be more fully represented in the structures of civil and political authority.

In contrast, the black nationalist tradition was built on a no-nonsense set of assumptions about the relative permanence of white supremacy. Blacks would have to place their energies in building economic and social institutions that would provide goods and services to other black people. By hiring blacks, they could utilize racial segregation as a barrier to create a black consumer market. Some nationalists also saw these steps as stopgap measures. Only when a significant number of African Americans established their own separate geopolitical space—perhaps a territory, a group or state, or resettlement to another country or continent—could ultimate security and the integrity of black people be achieved. The nationalists often saw themselves as accidental Americans, or Africans-in-exile. They frequently distrusted white liberals and reformers who expressed sympathy toward blacks even more than they distrusted white supremacist groups, because they felt the latter represented the true feelings of the white majority. Some felt that race war inside the United States, and indeed globally, was probably inevitable, and the best thing African Americans could do was to prepare for it. In 1852, Martin R. Delany called upon African Americans to emigrate because “we love our country, dearly love her, but she doesn’t love us—she despises us, and bids us begone, driving us from her embraces; but we shall not go where she desires us; but when we do go, whatever love we have for her, we shall love the country none the less that receives us as her adopted children” (section 1, document 17). Similarly, the first point in Marcus Garvey’s 1920 “Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World” reads: “… nowhere in the world, with few exceptions, are black men accorded equal treatment with white men, although in the same situation and circumstances, but, on the contrary, are discriminated against and denied the common rights due to human beings for no other reason than their race and color” (section 3, document 4). Almost fifty years later, Malcolm X observed, “… it is not necessary to change the white man’s mind. We have to change our own mind. You can’t change his mind about us” (section 4, document 13). These were the most extreme positions of the integrationist–nationalist ideological axis, but most African Americans during the century between the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement oscillated somewhere in between these two poles of racial opinion. In periods of political optimism, when the bar of institutional racism seemed to be in retreat, the integrationist perspective was usually dominant. But in times of white reaction and retrenchment from racial justice—such as the 1850s, 1920s, late 1960s, and early 1970s—black nationalism resurfaced.

A third strategic vision subsequently emerged, with the developing consciousness of the black working class and the growing intensity of labor struggles in the United States. This perspective neither accepted the structure of the contemporary society nor called for a separate black society, but rather advocated a radical transformation of the United States based on a fundamental redistribution of resources. This perspective did not merely push for the expansion of democracy but challenged the basic inequality of the economic structure. The objective here was to dismantle all forms of class hierarchy and social privilege. For T. Thomas Fortune, a printer who was born a slave, the working people’s struggles of the 1880s underscored the importance of class in understanding and transforming society: “The iniquity of privileged class and concentrated wealth … does not admit of the argument that every man born into the world is justly entitled to so much of the produce of nature as will satisfy his physical necessities …” (section 2, document 4). In 1912 Hubert Henry Harrison declared that “socialism stands for the emancipation of the wage slaves” (section 2, document 16).

This perspective coalesces in the period from 1915 to 1954, with the consolidation of the black working class and its struggle for jobs and for access to employment at an equitable wage. It became a social force in the emergence of the African Blood Brotherhood in 1922 (section 3, document 3); the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign in Harlem during the Great Depression (section 3, document 14); and the organization of the Sleeping Car Porters (section 3, document 17). The rise of working-class “organic intellectuals”—many of whom were associated with the Communist Party, such as southern organizers Angelo Herndon (section 3, document 11) and Hosea Hudson (section 3, document 12)—was particularly notable during this period. However, white racism, including that of white workers, continued to be a major obstacle.

These social visions—integration, nationalism, and transformation—are not mutually exclusive but are in fact broad, overlapping traditions. Throughout the twentieth century, these tendencies have been present, to varying degrees, in virtually every major mass movement in which black people have been engaged, from the desegregationist campaigns of the 1950s to the anti-apartheid mobilization of the 1980s. Though some organizations and individuals may have exemplified one tendency or the other, organizations and movements usually displayed a spectrum of views. Individuals often began their activist careers with one set of perspectives and moved to another as they perceive limitations of that paradigm. This was the case with Hubert Henry Harrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X.

These three competing paradigms continue to underlie the Black Freedom movement. The broad range of forces in the desegregation struggle included the Urban League, which conceptualized civil rights as an expression of extending rights to black people, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which had “the basic aim of achieving full citizenship rights, equality, and the integration of the Negro in all aspects of American life” (section 4, document 3). On the other hand, the left wing of the Civil Rights movement envisioned the necessity of a more far-reaching change. In 1963 John Lewis declared, “[t]he revolution is at hand, and we must free ourselves of the chains of political and economic slavery” (section 4, document 8).

Similarly the Black Power movement—a move toward nationalism that arose when the weaknesses of integrationism become evident—encompassed competing visions of the meaning of political power. Floyd McKissick, in his endorsement of Black Power, established the black capitalist venture of Soul City. On the other hand, the Black Panthers embraced a Marxist analysis of capitalism. Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton observed that “[t]he Black Panther Party bases its ideology and philosophy on a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, using dialectical materialism as our analytical method” (section 4, document 17). Fred Hampton called for class struggle, observing that “[w]e have to understand very clearly that there is a man in our community called a capitalist” (section 4, document 18). Angela Davis, a member of the Che-Lumumba Club of the Communist Party, explained why she is a Communist: “I am a Communist because I am convinced that the reason we have been forcefully compelled to eke out an existence at the lowest level of American society has to do with the nature of capitalism…. I am a Communist because I believe that black people, with whose labor and blood this country was built, have a right to a great deal of the wealth that has been hoarded in the hands of the Hughes, the Rockefellers, the Kennedys, the DuPonts, all the super-powerful white capitalists of America” (section 4, document 19). During this period of Black Power, the militant tradition of black workers found expression in the creation of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) in Detroit, and in the more moderate Coalition of Black Trade Unionists.

Race, and to a lesser extent class, have been central to theorizing African-American liberation. But since its inception, African-American social theory has also included a lively discussion about gender, though this has received little attention until relatively recently. The unusual position of African-American women has made the issue of gender critical—both in practice and for the development of theory. The denial of “the protections of private patriarchy” throughout their history has made the situation of African-American women exceptional in American life. Often doing the same work as men during slavery, after Reconstruction they worked both outside and inside the home. Exploited as labor, but also oppressed on the basis of gender and race, their history has created an experience distinct from that of both black men and white women. Though triply oppressed, they also occupy a creative space from which to critique U.S. social structure from multiple sites. As Anna Julia Cooper noted in 1892, to be an African-American woman was “to have a heritage … unique in all the ages” (section 2, document 7).

Given the significance of black women in the slave community, in the struggle for abolition and emancipation, and as workers and activists, it may be that many African-American men were more open to issues of gender than white men—advocating access to education for women and other nontraditional gendered roles—though often in terms of the optimal requirements for motherhood. Martin Delany, who called for the emigration of black people from the United States in 1852, declared: “Let our young women have an education; let their minds be well informed; well stored with useful information and practical proficiency…. Our females must be qualified, because they are to be the mothers of our children” (section 1, document 17). Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois were among the most consistent and vocal advocates for the rights of women.

But it is also true that, in subtle ways, the struggle for freedom was often framed in masculine terms. Abolitionist leader William Wells Brown lamented: “If I wish to stand up and say, ‘I am a man,’ I must leave the land that gave me birth” (section 1, document 14). Upon being expelled from the Georgia legislature in 1868, Henry McNeal Turner declared: “Am I a man? If I am such, I claim the rights of a man …” (section 2, document 2); and Frederick Douglass equates “what the black man wants” with the interests of the race as a whole (section 2, document 1). While clearly these formulations have to do with the semantic use of “man” for humankind, it is also true that they embodied often-unstated assumptions about the masculine privileges that nationhood entails. During Reconstruction, the demand for the hierarchical gender roles of the dominant society became integrally connected with the demand for freedom.

But black women have not had the luxury of defining freedom in patriarchal terms, and early on created an analysis of race, class, and gender that emerged from their experiences. While fully supporting the struggle for freedom, black women have addressed the issues of both gender and race. In 1851 Sojourner Truth declared “I am a woman’s rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man” (section 1, document 15). Anticipating the feminist theorizing of the 1980s and 1990s, in 1892 Anna Julia Cooper wrote that the African-American woman is “confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both” (section 2, document 7).

The consolidation of a black working-class perspective enhanced the development of a race- and class-based feminism. Domestic workers and women toiling in the cotton fields spoke out about their own conditions and created the context for a feminism grounded in the experiences of working women. A description of women workers in the cotton fields published in Crisis in 1938 laid the foundation for a sophisticated analysis of these issues, which were rediscovered by scholars in the 1980s, such as the double day and the unpaid labor of women. The following passage presents an analysis of the relationships between production and reproduction that is valid today (section 3, document 15):

In the past, this woman was compelled to reproduce a large number of children because a large labor supply was in demand. Large families also mean a cheaper form of labor, for children, as well as women, generally represent labor that does not have to be paid. Consequently, the “overhead” falls upon the family instead of the landlord. The landlord himself has enforced this monopoly by letting his farm go to the tenant or cropper having the largest family…. Now the tenant-croppers are charged with “over-population” by the economists and agriculturalists who disregard the unwholesome economic factors that have caused an increase in farm tenancy…. As one solution to the “over-population,” proponents of the sterilization racket are endeavoring to work up an agitation for sterilization of these cotton workers.

In 1949, Claudia Jones, a leader in the Communist Party, argued for a class-and race-based feminism. Her remarkable historical analysis, clearly articulating the triple oppression of race, class, and gender, anticipated the race, class, and gender theorists of the 1980s and 1990s. She analyzed the important role of negative representations of African-American women, presented an early formulation of “the personal is political,” and called for the organization of domestic workers.

As women activists took militant and leading roles in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements—in SCLC, SNCC, and the Black Panther Party—they confronted real problems of how to deal in practice with the dilemmas of race, class, and gender. Activists such as Fannie Lou Hamer spoke eloquently of the solidarities of race and the contradictions of gender and class: “… we are here to work side by side with this black man in trying to bring liberation to all people” (section 4, document 10). In the 1980s there was a proliferation of work on gender that seriously attends to the centrality of race and racism in the lives of African-American women, and critiques the essentialist view put forward by Euro-American feminists. But divergent perspectives also emerged that reflect the differences in strategic social visions among the African-American people as a whole. While most feminist theorists now write of the integration of race, class, and gender, there are clear differences in how women of diverse class backgrounds and experiences understand these relationships, their visions of a new society, and their notions of how to get there.

This book is an attempt to compile a representative sample of a range of writings that reflect the political thought of black Americans in the United States from colonial times to the end of the twentieth century. We have attempted to include varied opinions from women and men, workers, and the intelligentsia.

As in any anthology, there are limitations. This is not a typical encyclopedia of African-American thought. We wanted the book to reflect the full range of African-American thought, but as extensive as the scope of this volume is, there are some obvious omissions. In several cases copyright problems limited our access to certain materials. In another instance, one prominent black conservative economist refused to permit his published work to appear in this volume. Because it is a collection of social theory, the focus on thought, to some extent, abstracts it from practice. The purpose of this book is not to assess social and political movements, but rather to present the theories that informed them. Furthermore, the emphasis on available written sources omits a body of popular reflections that might tell us much about “organic” social theory.

Section 1 begins with the period from 1768 to 1861. This was the era of slavery and the issue motivating African Americans was abolitionism and efforts at reform, resistance, and revolt against slavery. It was also the time of the birth of African-American culture and society. Section 2 covers 1861 to 1915. The Civil War, Reconstruction, and the establishment of Jim Crow segregation defined the politics of this period. African Americans were overwhelmingly rural and the majority continued to live in the South, as two generations of African Americans coped with the aftermath of slavery and the War.

Section 3 concerns the years 1915 to 1954, which marks the period of the “great migration,” when African Americans in large numbers migrated from the rural South to the urban North. Two world wars, the “Red Summer” of 1919, the consolidation of the modern black working-class, the rise of black radicalism, and the emergence of the Civil Rights movement are also part of this era.

During the period covered by section 4—1954 to 1975—the Black Freedom movement flourishes through the Civil Rights struggle and the Black Power movement.

The years since 1975, treated in section 5, have been described as the second post-Reconstruction era. A time of rapidly developing class stratification both globally and within the United States, it has been characterized by new divisions and ideological debates among African Americans.

Whatever the site or political perspective from which African Americans theorize and struggle for freedom, resistance has had real consequences. In these pages you will read the words of people who, from different ideological vantage points, have fought for freedom. For those who have opposed the dominant society, taking a stand has often exacted a price: Marcus Garvey and Claudia Jones were exiled; W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson were severely harassed and denied passports; Henry Winston, Angela Davis, and Angelo Herndon spent years in jail; Fannie Lou Hamer and John Lewis were brutally beaten. From the mysterious death of David Walker to the executions and/or assassinations of Nat Turner, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton, the Attica Brothers, and countless known and unknown others, freedom for black people has always been won at a dear price. To these brave women and men we dedicate this book.

INTRODUCTION